The question of engaging men in gender equality has rarely felt more urgent than it does this week, after a Jane Doe filed a lawsuit alleging she was raped by seven members of a fraternity at Cornell University in 2024. The case has moved through social media feeds and dinner-table conversations with the particular, exhausting velocity of stories that women recognise but were hoping never to read again.
The plaintiff reported the incident to the Cornell University Police Department on 8 November 2024, and that same day, according to the Cornell Daily Sun, the Xi chapter of Chi Phi was placed on temporary suspension for alleged violations of the Student Code of Conduct. The seven Chi Phi members named as defendants in the lawsuit are Matthew Ingalls, Johnathan Newell, Winston Lee, Gillio Lopes, Diego Sarabia, Scott Norris and Scott Kretzschmar.
The university subsequently banned Chi Phi from campus and launched a Title IX investigation in 2025, which resulted in a range of disciplinary measures for the seven implicated members, TIME reports. Then, more recently, Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten announced his decision to reopen an investigation into the 2024 incident, telling ABC News he intended to present the case to a grand jury with Doe’s cooperation, according to 19th News.
Where are all the men in this conversation?
The case has, predictably, prompted the question that surfaces every time an incident of alleged male sexual violence becomes a culture-shifting moment: why is it overwhelmingly women doing the speaking? The frustration is not new. It arrives with every high-profile case, circulates among the same communities that have been doing this work for decades, and then, slowly, dissipates until the next time. The activists and advocates who have dedicated their working lives to addressing rape culture know this cycle intimately.
We spoke to three of them about what engaging men in gender equality actually looks like from the inside, and what it costs. Their answers were not especially comforting, but they were honest.
The first thing all three said, in different ways, was that the question itself contains a trap. Asking ‘Where are the men?’ in the aftermath of a sexual violence case positions men as an absent audience who need to be persuaded to attend, rather than as participants in the structures that produce the violence being discussed. The work, they explained, involves unpicking that framing before anything else can happen.
The reality of engaging men in gender equality work
That unpicking is slow. One of the three activists described spending months building trust with groups of young men before any substantive conversation about power, accountability or consent became possible. Another spoke about the particular difficulty of reaching men who are not already self-selecting into these spaces: the ones at the edges of the room, the ones whose body language signals that they are present under sufferance. A third described the emotional labour involved in remaining measured when the conversation turns, as it often does, to defensiveness.
What emerged from all three conversations was a picture of work that is painstaking, underfunded and frequently invisible. The headline cases, the lawsuits, the grand jury announcements: these are the visible surface. Beneath them is a sustained, unglamorous effort to shift the conditions that make those cases possible. Engaging men in gender equality is not a single conversation or a social media campaign. It is, as one of the three put it, the kind of work that takes longer than a news cycle.
The Tompkins County DA’s intention to bring the Cornell case before a grand jury means this particular story is not yet finished. For the women who have been following it, that is the only thread of procedural hope worth holding onto right now.
